Zetta Elliott's blog

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Women at Risk

“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

Thanks for sounding the alarm, Susan…women are attacked so often it’s no longer sounding LIKE news to people, it’s just more of the same–“some nutjob”–when really it’s an alarming pattern that’s acted out every minute of every day…thank God for men like Bob Herbert!

Thank you for sharing this article. This is sad, but true. Where’s all the outrage? what happened to these women is terrible, same with the Lane Bryant incident. News coverage for a little and then the incident was forgotten about.
I love Bob Herbet, his articles rock.
I love hip-hop music, but I hate the demeaning lyrics. Yet, it’s so hard for me to boycott rappers even when their lyrics are rude (50 cent, Ludacris, Lil Wayne). Artists like Common, Lupe Fiasco, Jay-Z (sometimes) and Kanye West, do a good job of not demeaning women in their lyrcis, if anything they make fun of those who do in theri lyrics and videos. However, sometimes if you hear a song and you just wanna dance you ignore the lyrics (like Every Girl by Lil Wayne. One of the worst songs ever, but such fun to dance to). Maybe when I’m older, the boycotting of demaning lyrics wil be easier. *sigh*

Great comment, Miss A. Have you seen the film Beyond Beats & Rhymes by Byron Hurt? He’s got this great line when talking about black women and misogyny in hip hop: “If President Bush came on TV and started talking about how much he hates ni**ers, would you say, ‘He ain’t talkin’ about me!’?” Too often women sanction the lyrics and videos by buying the songs, requesting them on the radio, or dancing to them in the club. That sends the message that it’s ok…but I know it’s hard, b/c so MUCH of the good music/best beats are set to some God-awful lyrics…also check out Chris Rock’s Never Scared; I show that in my classes, and we laugh then explore Rock’s routine on misogyny in hip hop–same idea: “He ain’t talkin’ about me!” Actually, yes, HE IS, he’s talking about YOU and all the black women you love, including those who are still little girls…looking for good music is like looking for good books–it takes a little extra effort, but it’s worth it in the end…

My youngest listens to some of the music but not much around me. She’d rather avoid the static I give her about the lyrics.

I don’t know rap, know a little hip-hop and I’m okay with my limited listening selection. If it’s not affirming, celebrating who we are, I’m not interested.

I was a strange child. I was always socially/politically leaning and yes, as I got older it did get easier to reject the negativity. Like Zetta said, once I acknowledged yeah they are talking about me and giving them my money fuels madness, I caught off my small spigot.

Thanks for the word of wisdom! It’s true that we are just encouraging the demeaning lyris by continuing to buy the music, but it;s difficult. I’m not strong enough yet to resist the temptation of going out and dancing to a song that may be demeaning to me. Yet I feel like a hypocrite because if any guy ever called me any of the names some of those rappers use, I’d smack them silly. I’m slowly getting there, trying not to buy the songs, just listen to them when they come on the radio or on when I’m at a party.

You’re on the right path, Miss A! it’s not really realistic to expect teens to give up on rap and BET, I don’t think–but being *aware* of the messages in those songs and videos is the most important step; you’ll take the right action in the right moment when you’re ready.

I think most men try to function as patriarchs–protecting and providing for “their” women (wives, daughters, mothers, etc.). They don’t feel their responsibility extends beyond their own private sphere, which is sad, b/c if MY daughter’s not safe, YOUR daughter’s not safe…